Integrative studies on rural landscapes: policy expectations and research practice

Abstract

During the 1990s, integrative (interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary) approaches gained increasing importance for rural landscape studies and numbers of such projects rose. However, it is not clear, what funding agencies expect from integrative projects, how researchers make them operational and what their outputs are. To identify policy expectations and research practice, we did a literature review and conducted standardised interviews with funding agencies, researchers, and project leaders. Results revealed that funding agencies have varying understandings of interdisciplinarity. They set up interdisciplinary programs not primarily to achieve scientific progress but to solve societal and environmental problems. Regarding publication output, peer-reviewed papers are preferred before research reports. Funding agencies seldom give practical advice to projects on how to meet their demands. Researchers frame project objectives in terms of their problem solving capacity. Although perceiving lack of common operational understanding of interdisciplinarity as a problem, researchers do not arrive at a common terminology. As barriers to integration we identified the spatial distance between researchers, project meetings, and management problems. Researchers perceive a tension between the applied character of the projects and the scientific expectations placed on them. Funding-agencies’ expectations are hardly known to researchers. We recommend greater dialogue between funding agencies and researchers especially regarding interdisciplinary objectives, problems and solutions. We suggest paying greater attention to the organisation and management of research to assure the necessary support for integrative research teams.

Introduction

Moves towards integrative research approaches in studies on rural landscapes have led to a rapid increase in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary studies, where researchers, managers and the public collaborate to find solutions to real landscape problems (Buchecker et al., 2003, van Asselt and Rijkens-Klomp, 2002, Haaren, 2002, Moss, 2000). Fry (2001) has shown that such partnerships place a high demand on academics to move out of their disciplinary frameworks and their academic environments and norms. Research on rural landscapes spans an ever wider range of subjects including geography (both social and physical), resource economics, ecology, planning and sociology, history, etc. In many ways, this development is providing evidence of the complexity of landscape and the need for integrative approaches. Both funding bodies and research environments promote integrative studies (Tress et al., 2001, Tress et al., 2003, Opdam et al., 2002, Wu and Hobbs, 2002, Fry, 2001, Tress and Tress, 2001, Decamps, 2000, Klijn and Vos, 2000, Turner, 2000, BMWV-KK, 1999, Holl and Nilsson, 1999, Fry and Sarlov-Herlin, 1995, Naveh, 1995, Nassauer, 1995).

Yet, it is not always clear what researchers do and produce in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary studies that make them different from disciplinary research. Nor is it clear what research funding agencies are expecting of the integration process. In this paper, we examine integrative landscape studies with a focus on what is expected to result from such studies compared with disciplinary studies, and comment on the process and products of integrative landscape research. This paper identifies policy expectations and reviews research practice in large-scale integrative studies on rural landscapes across Europe. The paper arises from the INTELS project (http://www.intels.cc) that examines large-scale interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary landscape studies throughout Europe with the specific aims of analyzing the state-of-the-art and identifying a code of good practice.

First, we provide an analysis of funding agency expectations. We identify their motivations for and aims in promoting interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity and discuss the expected outputs. Second, we present researcher perspectives on and experiences with integrative research. Third, we discuss the problems of researchers to translate the policy expectations into research practice and what difficulties they have to cope with. Finally, we identify some management aspects that can increase the performance of integrative landscape studies and help achieve a better match with policy expectations.